You'll Know
by bethos
Summary: The courtship of Travis and Hoshi, because there ought to be more out there for this pairing. (WIP)
1. The Decontamination Chamber

Title: You'll Know   
  
Author: Apocalypse  
  
Fandom: ENT  
  
Disclaimer: These characters belong not to me, though it grieves my heart greatly, but to Bermaga. Why? Because there is no justice.  
  
Pairing: Mayweather/Sato (elements of Mayweather/Cutler and Tucker/Cutler)  
  
Rating: PG-13  
  
Summary: The courtship of Travis and Hoshi.   
  
Author's Note: Because there's just not enough of this pairing out there.  
  
Chapter One: The Decontamination Chamber  
  
Hoshi sat down on the bench in the decontamination chamber and started to work the gel into her calf. There had to be a more practical way of doing this, she thought. Something that didn't involve being mostly naked in front of some of the more attractive men on the ship would be favourite. Of course, Travis was in his underwear, too ... and that was pretty easy on the eyes ...   
  
"Travis, I can get my back myself," Hoshi said, starting a little as her colleague's warm fingers started to massage decon gel into her shoulders.  
  
"Yeah, but so can I, without having to do any embarrassing wriggling," Travis pointed out. He sounded amused, fingers a bare centimeter above her skin. "Want me to stop?"  
  
Hoshi shook her head. "No," she said, "you just surprised me, that's all."  
  
"I'm full of surprises," Travis said cheerfully, rubbing the gel into her back. "When I'm done here, you want to get mine?"  
  
"Of course," Hoshi said.  
  
Travis worked magic with his fingers. He could probably quit Starfleet and become a masseuse, if the urge struck him, Hoshi thought.  
  
"Travis," said Hoshi suddenly.  
  
"Mmmhm?"  
  
"That had better be decon gel," she said.  
  
Travis laughed. "That's not fair," he said. "What else would it be?"  
  
"With you?" Hoshi snorted derisively. "It could be anything."  
  
"It's the decon gel," Travis said, in a tone of wounded innocence. "I don't know why you'd think I'd manuever to get you into the decontamination chamber with me just so I could put Chef's vanilla pudding all over you. Or why you'd think Dr. Phlox would let me do such a thing."  
  
"Vanilla pudding?" Hoshi stiffened. "Travis Mayweather, did you put vanilla pudding on me?"  
  
"Now where would you get an idea like that?" Travis asked.   
  
Hoshi swiveled on the bench to glare at him. He met her gaze, his expression utterly guileless save for the impish sparkle in his dark eyes.   
  
"You did, didn't you!" she exclaimed. "You put vanilla pudding on me!"  
  
"Did I?" Travis asked.  
  
"Travis!"  
  
"Well, I wouldn't recommend you taste it," he said, grinning at her in a flash of startling white. "I don't think it's supposed to be ingested."  
  
"That's what vanilla pudding is *for*," Hoshi said, trying not to smile back.   
  
Travis laughed again. "It's decon gel," he said. "Imagine, you thinking it was vanilla pudding. Just wait until I tell Liz about it, she'll split her sides."  
  
Hoshi rolled her eyes. "I'm getting you for that," she said.  
  
"How many things are you 'getting' me for now, Hosh?" Travis asked playfully. "I'd like to start keeping score." 


	2. The Best Laid Plains, Et Cetera

Chapter Two: The Best Laid Plans, Et Cetera … 

"So then I thought we'd take a walk around some of the lower corridors," Travis was saying briskly.  "And we can circle back through hydroponics and look at the plants. The evening is all planned out, although I think there's plenty of room for spontaneity if we get bored with it later on. What do you think, Liz?"

Liz, who was on the NX-01's crew roster as Elizabeth Cutler, worked in the science department as the ship's resident "bug lady". She also served as a medical assistant to Doctor Phlox when he was short of help – their association, despite an odd, semi-romantic history, had developed into a strong platonic friendship – and spent most of her off-duty time these days hanging around Travis Mayweather. 

At the moment, she was sitting on his bunk with her hands clasped neatly in her lap, looking up at him with a peculiar scrunched-up expression on her face which meant that she was trying to tell him something without actually using any words. He'd gotten pretty good at reading her during the past three months since they'd randomly decided together in the mess-hall that it might be a good idea – livening up both of their social lives – if they were to reach a state approximating "dating". This expression was probably going to be bad news.

"Travis …" she began. 

"We don't _have_ to go to hydroponics," Travis said quickly, "if you don't want to look at plants. That's where the spontaneity part comes in."

Liz sighed and shook her head. "It's not the plants," she said.

"We don't even have to take a walk," Travis said. "I just thought it would make a nice change from hanging out in my quarters and having popcorn fights."

"There was only the one popcorn fight," Liz pointed out, smiling slightly.

If he could make her smile with something as transient as the memory of a popcorn fight, things probably weren't as bad as all that. There was probably something wrong with work, or something. They could talk through it. Travis was good at other people's problems, just so long as no one wanted him to provide in-depth information about his personal feelings and experiences, at which he wasn't so good. "It was quite a popcorn fight, though," he said. "I think I've probably still got kernels in unmentionable places."

Liz closed her eyes as though warding off the imagery. "Well, I'm glad to have made some lasting effect on you at least," she said dryly.

Whatever that sentence actually meant, Travis didn't think it sounded good. "What do you mean?" he said. 

"I just don't think we're working out," Liz said.

"What are you talking about, we get along great!" Travis said. "You are the only girl I ever met who would have a such a rip-roaring popcorn fight with me."

"The truth is," and she looked away from him as though she couldn't bear to see his face, "there's someone else."

Travis sat down hard on the chair in front of his desk. "Oh," he said heavily.

So not only was she breaking up with him – he'd gathered that pretty quickly, 'I don't think we're working out' being kind of a dead giveaway – she'd already given it a lot of thought and moved on to someone else without bothering to talk to him about it first. Clearly this was nothing that communication could solve; she had made the decision for both of them that there was nothing to be done about whatever problems she had with the relationship, such as it was, and closed the door on it. Slammed shut, without any possibility of his doing anything to stop it.

Travis didn't like it when other people made drastic changes in his life without bothering to talk to him about them first. It was one of the reasons he and his brother had so much trouble getting along … 

"That's different, then," he said, trying to keep the dullness out of his voice, trying to still sound like Travis. 

It wasn't as though it had been a particularly deep and caring relationship, but it had been a lot of fun, and as far as he could tell there hadn't been anything _wrong_ with it even if there hadn't been much life-changingly _right about it either. He thought that it would have had at least a few more months of intimacy and food fights and silly arguments about whose toothbrush was whose before he had to worry about it falling apart. _

But evidently Liz and whoever had taken her away from him had other plans.

All right then. He'd find someone else eventually, it was a small ship with lots of women who weren't related to him at all. It was just a slap in the face and he didn't know how long it would take him to recover from it.

And he was clearly more attached to Liz Cutler than he'd previously realized. "So, umm," he said, coming to the realization that this was a conversation riddled with uncomfortable silences and that he, of all people, was carrying most of it, "who?"

Liz blushed and worked her hands together nervously in her lap. "Well … I, uh," she said. It was clear that she didn't want to say.

"Come on, you know I've got a right to know," Travis said. "I mean, you're leaving me for him, I'd kind of like to know who he is."

"Well, you do know him," Liz admitted, "of course you do, we all know everyone on this ship, don't we?"

"Is this what you Earth-people call 'being evasive'? Because I don't think it works very well," Travis said. 

"Travis, can't you take anything seriously?" Liz asked suddenly, snappishly.

Well, that was uncalled for. "I am perfectly serious," he told her. "If I were any graver, I would be dead. Now would you please answer the question?"

Liz sighed. "Travis, I …" And she trailed off. "I'm not sure how to say this …"

"So is there not anyone else, you just made that up to make this easier for you?" Travis said, feeling irritated and put-upon, and not particularly pleased that he'd apparently lost his girlfriend to an imaginary shipmate. 

"No, there is, it's just that he kind of doesn't know about it yet," Liz explained. She at least had the grace to look guilty.

"So I've been ousted by someone's _shadow?" Travis exclaimed. "You're dumping me for the __idea of someone else?"_

"Er," Liz said, "sort of."

Travis snorted. "Sort of? What do you mean, sort of?"

"Look, Travis, we're just not going anywhere, and if I'm attracted to someone else to the point where I keep comparing you to my idea of him, that's not fair to either of us!" Liz said. "So we're done. All right?"

"Clearly," Travis said.

"And I hope we can still be friends," Liz said.

"Well, Liz, I think we should part on good terms," Travis said truthfully, "but you know, I'm a bit upset about this. I think we should talk about being good friends again after I've had some time to, you know, simmer and sulk and throw my stuff at the walls."

"I'm sorry, Travis." She was already at the door. 

"I'm sorry, too," said Travis, when she was gone. He got up and paced for awhile, only to sit down again on his bunk. "_Damn it." It wasn't expressive, but he wasn't sure how else he was going to express what he was feeling – he wasn't even sure what it was. _

His ego was bleeding, sure. And he'd thought he and Liz were going to have more time together before the inevitable break-up, but it wasn't as though he'd expected them to go the distance. No matter how much fun they'd had together, no matter how much more he'd been hoping to have with her, still, she was just somebody. 

There were other fish in the sea. It wasn't like he'd found _the fish._

Dissatisfied, Travis decided he was going to go to his special place. 

Everything was clearer when you were upside-down. 


	3. Commiserations

Chapter Three: Commiserations

Hoshi stood at the entrance of the room, quietly looking up at where Travis hovered upside-down in his gravity-free zone. His eyes were closed and he did not seem at first to be aware of her presence. Most of his attention was apparently concentrated on his deep breathing: in and out, in and out.

She'd been on her way to dinner when she'd run into Liz Cutler, apparently upset and trying hard to control it.

"So I broke up with Travis," was the way that the conversation had begun.

"Really? Why?"

"Because … because I'm attracted to someone else," Liz had said, and stormed off toward the mess-hall, leaving Hoshi somewhat adrift in the corridor before she'd decided to go and find Travis and see how he was doing. 

Hoshi found this reason, personally, to be somewhat wishy-washy … but if Liz didn't want Ensign Mayweather anymore, then she had every right to terminate their romantic association … it was just that it had come as kind of a shock. You would think that she would have discussed it with her closest friends before deciding to just go ahead and do it.

And as for who Liz preferred to the helmsman, well, it would've been easier pulling teeth with a mechanic's pliers than getting that information out of her.

"Travis?" Hoshi said finally, after watching him for quite some time.

He opened his eyes and looked down at her, surprised. "Oh, hi, Hoshi," he said. "Didn't know anyone was in here."

"I actually came looking for you," Hoshi said.

"Oh," Travis said. "I don't go on duty again until tomorrow morning, barring emergencies. Is there an emergency?"

"No, actually, _I_ came looking for you," Hoshi said, smiling slightly. 

"Oh good," Travis said. "Any particular reason?"

"I wanted to see how you were doing," Hoshi said hesitantly. 

"Oh." Travis closed his eyes again and smiled in a flash of startling white. "They do say that the only thing that travels faster than Warp 5 is news."

Hoshi folded her arms over her chest and tilted her head back to get a better look at him. "Who says?"

"They," Travis said. "You know. The ones who are the they in the _them _but that aren't ever the us_._"

"Your grammar," Hoshi said, laughing softly. "It hurts."

"Sorry," he replied. "Want to come up here?"

"All right," Hoshi said, hesitating a little. "How do I …"

"Oh, it's not hard. There's no gravity here, so you just … push up from the floor … here, I'll give you a hand," Travis said. He maneuvered easily through the air and offered her his hand.

She let him pull her up, pushing off from the ground with a little more momentum than she expected. He steadied her with both arms. His hands were warm through the fabric of her uniform jumpsuit. 

"And then you just …" Travis said, helping her swivel so that she was upside-down, just as he was. "Neat, huh?"

Hoshi floated there for a moment, not moving a muscle. Then, slowly, she relaxed. "It's … odd," she said. "But it's … like floating. It's very nice." 

"Liz never liked it," Travis said. "She never really explained why, but I think she got a little motion-sick because the floor being the ceiling kind of disoriented her."

"Did you ever …?" Hoshi started to ask.

"No, not once," Travis said sadly. "Pity, really, I think it would've been a horizon-broadening sort of thing to do."

Hoshi felt herself reddening. "Um … I don't think we're talking about the same thing," she hazarded after a moment.

Travis looked at her innocently. "What? You mean you weren't going to ask if we ever had an upside-down picnic in here?"

Hoshi stared at him for a split second, and then she laughed. "Travis Mayweather," she said, "you are _too much."_

"What were you actually going to ask?" Travis inquired after a brief silence in which they floated, carelessly, in the belly of the _Enterprise._

"If you ever noticed her seeming dissatisfied or anything," Hoshi said, looking away. "I mean … she never said anything to me."

"No," Travis said sadly, "it came out of nowhere. I mean, sometimes she would get a little moody for no apparent reason but I figured that she was just, you know, being a girl."

Hoshi laughed. "Being a girl?" she said.

"You know how girls are," Travis said, grinning at her. "Irrational … prone to fits of emotion, blowing things out of proportion, getting moody about nothing … getting angry at me for things and not telling me what they are when I don't even know I've done anything wrong …"

"Yes, Travis," Hoshi said drolly, "women are totally irrational creatures beyond the comprehension of the male gender because nothing they do ever makes logical sense …"

"Hey, you said it, not me," Travis said playfully.

Hoshi glanced toward the ceiling – which was, in this case, the floor. "Why do I talk to you?" she asked in a long-suffering tone.

"Hmm," Travis said, "don't know … for luck, for laughs, for the unknown."

"I guess two out of three isn't bad," Hoshi said, smiling at him.

Travis chuckled.

They floated there in companionable silence for a few minutes, looking up at the floor. Hoshi had no idea she could have so much fun just floating around doing nothing … but the company probably had something to do with it; Travis had an infectiously mischievous personality and it seemed like nothing could get him down. It was as though once he had an audience – to listen to his tomfoolery or his tales of terror – he simply couldn't let himself stay serious for too long.

Hoshi wondered whether or not he was afraid of what he might say or think if he weren't keeping things at least partially in the world of having fun.

Finally Travis spoke again. "Thank you, Hoshi," he said quietly.

"For what?" Hoshi asked, a little surprised. She hadn't done anything much as far as she could tell; she'd tried to steer the conversation towards his break-up with Liz, so that he could spill it if he needed to and use her as a confidante and shoulder to cry on should it be necessary, but he'd just turned the conversation back around and made teasingly sexist remarks about irrational female behavior, trying to get her feminist gander up … and she hadn't even risen to his bait, so what was he thanking her for?

"Just for coming to find me," Travis said, as though he were admitting a guilty secret, and he laughed a little, sheepishly. "I guess sometimes I miss the _Horizon_ … living on a ship completely surrounded by people who really care about you at every turn. Even the ones that you don't _like_ very much are still … family, even the ones you're not related to by blood, you're all part of the family. You know? I miss people caring about me."

"Of course people care about you!" Hoshi exclaimed. "Everybody cares about you."

"It's not the same," Travis said. "It's like, they care about me because I'm a vital member of the crew or whatever, not really because I'm me."

"_I _care about you," Hoshi pointed out quietly.

Travis grinned at her suddenly, and it was a somehow more heartfelt expression than any smile of his she had seen on his face. "I know," he said. "That's what I was thanking you for."


	4. Murphy's Law

Chapter Four: Murphy's Law  
  
Hoshi Sato stalked down the corridor from the turbolift. Ordinarily she greeted people in the hallway as she traversed the ship, but today people seemed to be getting out of her way. It probably had something to do with the way her shift had gone, or possibly her body language and the way she was biting people's heads off left and right.  
  
Although she'd had a rocky start here on the Enterprise, she was more than adept now at dealing with the trials and tribulations of spaceflight. Then again, even the finest officer can have a rough shift, and today was the roughest she'd had in a very long time.  
  
It had begun with an irritated communiqué from Starfleet Command demanding to know why they hadn't been answering hails. The Enterprise had been studying some unique – if apparently harmless – radiation emitted from a not-too-distant nebula; she wasn't entirely sure why it had gone undetected, but the radiation affected their long-distance subspace equipment and rendered them deaf, dumb and blind for everything further than a few light-years away … in short, rendering them a complete blackout zone for Starfleet Command.   
  
Dealing with the irate communications officer at Fleet who refused to listen to reason had taken her all of twenty minutes before Captain Archer had wandered onto the Bridge that morning – admittedly she had started her shift a little early, but her own early morning arrival made her irritated when a couple of the other bridge crew (notably Captain Archer and Lieutenant Reed, of all people, who was usually so anal about punctuality the younger crewmen had had cause to mutter about phase pistols buried in his rectal cavity) turned up late.   
  
If that hadn't been enough to start the day on the wrong foot, ten minutes after she'd given Admiral Forrest to Captain Archer in his ready room, a Vulcan exploratory vessel on its way back from somewhere – and running into the Vulcans returning from space humans hadn't explored was always at least mildly irksome, since the Vulcans had a habit of being infuriatingly superior about it … in control of their emotions her foot! - and they had wanted a progress report. Hoshi had informed them, of course, that the Enterprise was a Starfleet vessel, under human and not Vulcan jurisdiction. The Vulcan in charge of communications had answered sounding puzzled that the S'talha's sensors were picking up definite Vulcan life-signs aboard their ship. The resulting argument had degenerated from undiplomatic to downright tactless in less than a minute; the Subcommander's presence aboard, Hoshi had been only too glad to report, did not make the Enterprise's mission the business of the Vulcan High Command. The S'talha's communications officer eventually backed down from her extremely rude position, claiming that she and her ship had been in deep space for awhile and had been cut off from communications with the High Command for the past six months. Hoshi, glad that the incident was finally ending, hadn't pressed the point, but it had left her in a foul humor for the next misadventure that occurred an hour and a half later.  
  
First contacts were still sketchy for Captain Archer and the rest of the crew; there was no real protocol that had been invented, and although the Vulcans recommended caution and avoidance of cultural contamination, there had still been very little progress in discerning what exactly that meant. Therefore, first contact with the Toshani left the entire crew on edge.   
  
The Toshani were a delicate, fragile-looking race with huge blue eyes, thin lips and prehensile tongues, whose vessel imitated their small, delicate frames and was vaguely reminiscent of across between a boat and a treehouse made of bamboo, except that it was made of a metal alloy which T'pol had announced her unfamiliarity with.  
  
They seemed friendly enough, except that they refused to impart definite information about anything. Hoshi, with the help of the universal translator – after a heart-stopping moment when the syntax had refused to align and the translation algorithm threatened to give up completely and peter out and leave her with a completely dead piece of equipment – had little trouble deciphering most of their language, although it would be some days before she would actually have anything resembling fluency in it – there were a lot of odd growly sounds that she had no name for yet in any specialized vocabulary, in addition to the more familiar glottal stops … and the spacing in between the words in a sentence evidently changed the meaning of every word in the sentence, so that if you had to stop for breath in the midst of a quick sentence for whatever reason you could end up saying something completely different from what you had meant to …   
  
It was a fascinating adventure into exolinguistics, the kind of thing she'd signed up for, except that she had to do it under pressure with malfunctioning equipment after a morning that had already been hectic at best; paralyzed with fear against the idea of making any kind of mistake, she'd apologized so often to the Toshani vessel for her own beginning status at deciphering their tongue that she now got the feeling that they were trying not to laugh at her. The one sentence that she was pretty sure she had down in Toshani was "There is no need to apologize, young one," because she had heard it so damn many times in the past four hours.  
  
Communications were at a standstill now because the Toshani were in their "sleep period" (ten hours a day, without fail, while their ship, escorting the Enterprise to their home planet so that Captain Archer and his exolinguist could open up proper diplomatic relations between their peoples).   
  
She stormed into her quarters, feeling unsettled and wanting to break something or at least make a huge, totally unconstructive mess. She settled for sitting on her bed and brushing her hair with brisk, rough strokes.   
  
"Dammit," she said. It didn't help, but she wasn't really expecting it to. She needed a better way to release frustration. Maybe she could talk to Lieutenant Reed or Subcommander T'pol about continuing her martial arts training …  
  
She wasn't even given the chance to sit and sulk properly in private; there was someone at the door.  
  
"Come in," she said, more out of habit than anything else; at this point she was more in the mood to break things than to socialize.  
  
It was Travis. He was casual as he entered her quarters, even though he'd never been in them before as far as he could remember, and glanced around them as though taking notes for future reference. "Hi," he said. "Rough day?"  
  
"You were there," she replied, sighing and leaning back on her palms. "You know."  
  
"Yeah," he replied. "I didn't see everything – I had plenty to do at the helm – but I could tell you were taking the worst of it."  
  
Hoshi's mouth quirked into a wry smile. "I guess my professional reserve isn't worth beans," she said.  
  
"Nope," Travis said cheerfully. "You left the Bridge looking like you needed to beat the living daylights out of something, so I thought I'd come by and volunteer."  
  
Hoshi glanced askance at him. "You want me to hit you?"  
  
"Not especially, no," he replied, with a brief flash of his dazzling-white grin. "But you've been there for me when I needed you and I'm more equipped to be punching bag than shoulder to cry on."  
  
Hoshi laughed in spite of herself – just a weary half-giggled sound. "Thanks," she said. "I think I'd rather not beat you up, though."  
  
"All right," he said. "Well, if you don't need a punching bag, how about a dinner companion? You can rant at me all night about prehensile tongues."  
  
The way he said it there was a double entendre in there, but she was too tired to sort through all the words in the sentence to find it. She smiled tiredly and said, "Thanks," again. And then she added, "All right. Blood sugar's probably got something to do with this mood."  
  
By the time they reached the mess-hall, where Trip and Malcolm joined them, Hoshi hadn't completely forgotten about her horrific shift, but it was, at least, a thing that felt more like "yesterday" than "this morning" … he kept her entertained, kept her laughing, and made sure to use Lieutenant Reed and Commander Tucker as the butts of his jokes for the course of the evening out of consideration for her weakened defenses – the result of a very long day.  
  
He was at his most charming all night, joking and laughing and telling stories; sometimes they flirted, sometimes they didn't, but that was the same as it always was between the two of them.   
  
And as they walked together back toward her quarters, ostensibly because Travis wanted to finish telling her his ghost story about the wheezing gentleman and the rocking chair, a thought struck her. She waited until the finish of his terrifying tale – not up to his usual standard, but maybe she hadn't been listening properly – and then she decided, what the hell? Why not ask if she wasn't sure?  
  
"Travis," Hoshi said, "was that your idea of asking a girl out to dinner?"  
  
Travis smiled slyly at her. "Nah," he said. "Hoshi, when we go on a date, I promise you you'll know."  
  
She blinked at him. "I will?"  
  
He nodded, completely self-assured. "Yep," he said.  
  
"How?"   
  
He raised his eyebrows at her, his expression completely earnest, although a smile glinted in his eyes. "You'll be completely swept off your feet," he said.   
  
Hoshi couldn't help but laugh. "You're outrageous, Travis Mayweather."  
  
"I don't see you outraged, Hoshi Sato," he replied. "See you tomorrow." Then he put his hands in the pockets of his uniform coverall and strolled down the corridor in the direction of his own quarters, whistling.  
  
She watched him go for awhile, wondering idly what to make of that.   
  
"Swept off my feet, huh?"  
  
No … they were playing, just like they always were. He was just getting over Ensign Cutler. There was nothing doing there, she was grasping at straws that weren't there just because he was her good friend and he was handsome and charming.  
  
But she waited until she could no longer hear his cheery whistling and the click of his feet against the metal floor before she turned and went back into her quarters. 


End file.
